Fischer-Spassky was the seminal event in the last half century of chess, sparking interest in the game the likes of which has rarely been seen. Rather than the actual moves on the board, it was the human interest angle, especially Fischer’s quixotic quest, and his quirky personality amid the backdrop of the US-Soviet Cold War clash, which engendered the massive outpouring of interest. My point in writing K2K4 (Knight to King 4: The Fischer-Kasparov Match) was not to definite

I am convinced if Apollo XIII happened today, there is no way those astronauts would have survived. NASA would have looked to its computers which would have concluded the situation is hopeless, so start planning the memorial ceremony. Unlike the desperate human minds at work in 1971, the human minds of 2014 would be trained only to push buttons on a computer and the machine would never think that with a little duct tape, cardboard and a hose you can construct a life-saving

My brother and I had a board set up in the same position as Fischer and Spassky’s in far away Reykjavik that summer of ’72. We sat mesmerized for hours every day, our attention divided equal parts between the board and the endearingly goofy Shelby Lyman on TV. The broadcast was on WNET, Channel 13 in New York, soon to be PBS, primitive even by 1972 standards. After all, Telstar had launched in 1962, allowing transoceanic images to be beamed across the globe. Despite this t